Why does this time slot matter? Because it’s when the U.S. East Coast goes to lunch, the end of the work day in Western Europe, and the start of the work day in California. It’s a bit late for Australia or India, but otherwise, it’s a magical hour when just about the entire English-speaking blog-reading world gets on the internet.

Chartbeat’s been providing this kind of data to sites since 2009, but news companies are different. As Chartbeat’s Tony Haile told GigaOM’s Mat Ingram, an e-commerce site wants to know how to funnel its customers through to a sale; news editors want to know where their readers are coming from, what content they’re engaging with, whether their social media campaigns are working, which new headlines are luring readers in and which new advertisements may be turning them off.

Newsbeat organizes its content by author, not product. As Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber notes, individual writers, not just editors or designers, can make better use of the tool — particularly since they’re also frequently charged with promoting their stories on social media. As a journalist, your engagement doesn’t have to end when you file.

This kind of data can also usefully confirm or confound your editorial intuitions. Alexis Madrigal writes that red-meat quick-hit gadget stories that rack up huge pageviews at other technology sites don’t actually do nearly as well as the odd, historical, reflective stories he showcases at The Atlantic:

We publish 1,500+ word stories reexamining email as a writing tool for professors or laser etching on gravestones or advances in pizza box design.… While not all of these pieces generate a lot of traffic, a surprising amount do. It is the success of this kind of long-form technology writing that allows us to keep doing it.

I agree with Mat, Megan and Alexis but I think there’s one big point that needs to be hammered home: the need for tailored real-time web analytics is perhaps strongest for news organizations because we’re working and publishing in real-time, too.

The rules for newspapers or magazines or even blogs five to ten years ago no longer hold for us. We don’t deliver to your house or increasingly, even your RSS reader. We count on our readers and other organizations to get our stories to you, the reader — and we are competing with every other form of real-time content you could possibly be looking at on your computer, tablet or smartphone screen.

Our business is not publication, but broadcasting. But it’s not an indiscriminate broadcast, like most traditional TV or radio; it’s a targeted broadcast, matching stories with the readers who are looking for them, even if they don’t yet know that they are.

I can know at 3 p.m. EST exactly who in the world can be reached by this story and how I might reach them. That’s what real-time analytics lets me do.